During a June 23, 2009 press conference, President Obama made a very specific promise about what would become the Affordable Care Act the following March. "When I say if you have your plan and you like it," Obama explained, "what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health […]

Conservatives, the joke goes, believe life begins at conception and ends at birth. Now, anti-abortion forces and their Republican allies in Ohio are doing their best to show that jest is true. As the Columbus Dispatch reported Tuesday, a group of Republican state legislators is suing to prevent GOP Governor John Kasich's move to accept […]

President Obama held a public event on Monday to address the serious problems plaguing the federal online health care exchange serving the 34 states which refused to create their own. Echoing former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pronouncement that the web site difficulties are "unacceptable," Obama insisted, "There's no excuse for these problems" hampering the launch of […]

On April 7, 2009--less than three months after Barack Obama first took the oath of office--the Daily Show's Jon Stewart perfectly summed up the red-hot, right-wing rage that hasn't cooled since. "I think," Stewart explained to frothing at the mouth Tea Party supporters, "you might be confusing tyranny with losing." Nevertheless, just days later thousands […]

This most miserable of weeks for the Tea Party did offer one ray of sunshine for the GOP's hardest of the hardliners. They rejoiced at the findings of an analysis by Yale professor Dan Kahan which revealed that Tea Baggers "appear to be slightly, but solidly more scientifically literate than non-tea party members." Unfortunately, basic […]

While Stephen Colbert was roasting Cardinal Timothy Dolan at Thursday's Al Smith Dinner in New York, the organization Dolan heads was quietly confessing that it got burned by the Republican Party's hostage-taking of the federal government and U.S. debt ceiling. In the opening paragraph its press release, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (UCCSB) "welcomed […]

From the moment he first picked up the Speaker's gavel, the choice before John Boehner was a simple one. He could betray the far-right Tea Party extremists whose support for him was always tenuous or he could betray his country. When it came to his party's debt ceiling blackmail--which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged […]

One day after hijacking a veterans march on the World War II Memorial closed by the government shutdown her Tea Party has been demanding since 2011, Sarah Palin took to Facebook to lob another grenade at President Obama. Should Republicans succeed in blocking the debt ceiling increase required to allow Uncle Sam to keep paying […]

On Sunday, Tea Party icons Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz appropriated a veteran's march to the World War II memorial in Washington to blame the Obama administration for services idled by the government shutdown. The march organizers were none too happy about it, explaining on their web site, "We feel disheartened that some would seek […]

After first threatening to destroy the American economy if Obamacare wasn't defunded or delayed, desperate House Republicans have sent the President a new ransom note. Now, the GOP will grant a six-week extension to the debt ceiling and reopen the government if President Obama, among other things, accepts cuts to mandatory spending programs including Medicare […]